Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
That's what competition is. The higher the quality, the higher the price you can command. Put your price TOO high, and folks will put up with lesser quality rather than pay the price premium. Thus, even with the ability to SET the price an ebook costs, the publisher cannot necessarily SELL the ebook at that price.
We do not require different ebook-stores to compete on price for the same ebook in order to have the benefits of pricing competition. There is competition by other books.
Lee
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It's a mistake for indie authors to price too highly, especially if they have a catalogue of books. I recently got around to uploading all my titles to Amazon. Going by received wisdom, I priced most of them at $2.99, except one, which I priced at 99¢ as a come-on. Amazon then discounted it to 49¢ (I had previously offered it free via Smashwords, and one of their associates hadn't updated that price to the current 99¢).
The 49¢ title is selling ten times as many as each of the others. Ten sales at 49¢ generate a royalty of $1.715. One sale at $2.99 generates a royalty of about $2 at amazon.com (70% rate, less data transfer fee) or $1 at amazon.co.uk (35%, less data transfer fee): say an average of $1.50.
Thus the 49¢ price is
more profitable for the author, and it garners ten times as many readers, who then might go on to buy other books from that author's catalogue.
In light of this, I reduced my prices across the board today to $1.00 per title, while the 49¢ title is still on sale at that price. (BTW I hate all this "99" nonsense -- is anybody fooled by it?)